


Fragments of memories

by LadyBones_92



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Hydra (Marvel), Memories, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, fragments
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:55:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22854331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyBones_92/pseuds/LadyBones_92
Summary: It’s hard to try to remember what you’ve been when all you have left is nothing more than fragments of memory from a past life.





	Fragments of memories

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Frammenti di memoria](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10663611) by [LadyBones_92](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyBones_92/pseuds/LadyBones_92). 



> Hello there! I found this old fic of mine so I decided to translate it since I've already posted in italian. Hope you enjoy it. I'm sorry for all the mistake you may find. Let me know what you think.

Sometimes, memories are all we have until even those will disappear. Darkened, erased, and all that’s left is nothing more than an empty shell, and then you’ll have to rely on what’s left. Fragments of memories blown away by the wind.

1944.

His fingers couldn’t hold the grip, as if made of butter. And he ended up falling down, into the void. He remembered the wind stroking his face like a passionate lover. The snow under him to cushion the fall, then the nothingness. Flashes of meaningless images. The needle of syringe to puncture his skin and a male voice far away.

_“Curare injected, Sir. We’re ready to begin…”_

His eyes had become heavy, his muscles had slowly relaxed and he had no choice but to let go. He wanted to said something, he wanted to wriggle free… he wanted a lot of things, but his body had decided to give up for him. Everything else was nothing that a giant black spot smearing his mind.

He remembered, though, the shining of the metal and that strange feeling of lightness and at the same time of heaviness that pervaded his left arm.

His.

Even that adjective sounded strange to him, but then that feeling was taken away by the cold. He had felt it seep in his bones, until he had stopped feeling anything, as if slowly every single fiber of his being had begun to disappear.

_Bucky_ – an echo dissolved in time.

1991.

Tight in his right hand, he had a shotgun. Tight enough to bleach his knuckles, while – hidden under the darkness of a bridge – stood by. An olive green car had turned the corner of a dirt road on Long Island, catching his attention.

A man at the wheel and a woman sitting at his side, laughing. He wasn’t sure, but he could’ve sworn that the man leaned towards her whispering something in her hear. Probably something funny, or romantic, but he wasn’t there for that.

No, he was there to complete a mission.

It took him a glance in order to recognise the man – white hairs and moustache – portrayed in the photo that had been given him. They hadn’t told him what his name was and he hadn’t asked. He never did.

A name wouldn’t stop him from pulling the trigger.

He started to move slowly, basking in the last shred of darkness before the rays of the sun began to shatter on his metal arm.

And he had seen it, that woman’s gaze resting on him and looking with wide eyes at him. She wasn’t in that photo. He could have spared her, but he wasn’t made for that, and so he did the one thing he was capable of.

He ended those two lives.

They turned him into a weapon, because that’s what they needed. Someone else to put the finger on the trigger.

And he did it.

2014.

He knew him.

The man on the bridge, he knew him. A part of him knew that this wasn’t the first time that his footsteps had ended up crossing those of the man he had fought with. There had been something.

Something in his voice, when he had heard pronounced that name – Bucky – that had ended up awakening what, he knew, had been drowsy somewhere in his brain. As if his synapsis – at the sound of that name, spoken by that voice – had received a sudden nerve impulse and had ended up to start to work again.

A fuse ready to explode, and all it took was a few word to implode.

_"I’m with you ‘till the end of the line…"_

It kept ringing in his head even then, while – standing in front of a see-through display case – he was staring the image of a vanished existence.

He had lived in the folds of history as a ghost, to wake up between ashes and dust: _all that was left of James Buchanan Barnes._


End file.
